the sony vaio a series was a great looking, 17-inch powerhouse when it first came out, but the design was starting to get a little old. sony fixes this with the introduction of its all-new, slimmer vaio vgn-ax570g series. the super-sleek ax570g improves on the a series, adding a modular tuner that fits in your system's dvd drive or in the docking station. the result: watching tv on your notebook no longer requires carrying that bulky dock.

the vaio ax series features the same stunning 17-inch xbrite screen currently found on the sony vaio vgn-a790. the two systems are very similar in weight, tipping the scales at 8.8 and 8.6 pounds, respectively. the design, however, is much improved. the system looks slimmer, similar in design to the newly released hp pavilion dv8000.

the new ax series will also feature microsoft's windows media center edition 2005. sony will slowly begin to phase out its acclaimed sony vaio zone suite. it was a great multimedia suite and the move to mce 2005 shows the os's prevalence. the tv tuner is hot swappable with the dvd+r dl drive.

sony is slowly starting to bring back the integrated web cam. we've seen this in the sony vaio vgn-fj180, and now the same 0.3-megapixel camera can be found in the ax series. with the growing popularity of video over ip and video chat engines, the built-in camera is a welcome addition to the 17-inch models.

the ax570g will be configured with two 80gb hard drives for a total of 160gb. it's loaded with a pentium m 750 (1.86 ghz), not the fastest processor out there, but quite sufficient. graphics will be supplied by ati and the mobility radeon x700 for very serious gamers.

the system comes with a built-in fingerprint sensor, so memorizing passwords will be a thing of the past. one weak spot perhaps--battery life, as expected, sounds like a drag at only an hour and change, according to sony.

Cisco Cheng is the Lead Analyst of the laptop team at PCMag.com. He’s a one-man wrecking crew who tests and writes about anything considered a laptop (yes, even netbooks). He’s been with PC Mag for over 10 years and gets occasional headaches from all the technical knowledge he has absorbed during that time. He’d still be snowboarding and playing basketball had he not been through multiple knee surgeries (well, two). Now he spends his time with Google Reader, the iPhone 3G, and his now 3-year...
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